Iceland, country of many waterfalls. From the small, to the ridiculously enormous.
And yes, I’m desperately trying to get up to date with postings – now I’m only three weeks or so behind.
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A Blue Lagoon goodbye
The timing was good, so what better way to go to the airport than via the Blue Lagoon? One of Iceland’s biggest tourist … attractions? Traps? I’m not sure. For a geothermal spa (with water coming from a nearby geothermal power plant) it’s not cheap, but it was definitely a nice way to wind down before getting on an aeroplane to fly home. The pale blue water is full of silica and sulphur (I’m sure my hair still smelt sulphurous on the flight home), and is deliciously warm.
Along with access you get a little plastic bracelet. It allows you to lock all your clothes in a locker, and to buy drinks from a lagoon-side bar if you fancy. There are buckets of silica mud around to make yourself look silly (also some possible benefit to your skin, I don’t know). And the waterfall really does give an amazing shoulder massage.
Snippets from the drive back to town…
Jökulsárlón is the biggest glacier lagoon in Iceland, filled with giant chunks of glacier which have calved from Breiðamerkurjökull (jökull means glacier). It’s also filled with seals (well, a few at any rate) and boat buses full of tourists who don’t get to go life-threateningly close to the glacier, which is no fun at all.
After spending some time melting, the small glacial icebergs float out to sea and escape.
After having our fill of watching enormous glacier chunks and seals, we drove down the road to check out two of the smaller glacier lagoons nearby. Breiðárlón was so unimpressive that I’d suggest you could set up a similar attraction by throwing a few half-melted icecubes into a particularly muddy mud puddle.
Fjallsárlón on the other hand was quite cool. Still much muddier than Jökulsárlón, it had a lot of glacier chunks floating in it, and a calving glacier toe barely any distance away.
